Lixil Vietnam’s INAX sanitary ware brand on Friday donated VND1 billion (US$44,000) to support Viet Nam Television’s Tam Long Viet (Vietnamese Heart) Fund’s heart operation programme.

The programme will provide free surgeries for poor and underprivileged children in Viet Nam with congenital heart diseases. The fund will be used to perform 30 surgeries on under-16 children whose families are too poor to afford the operation.

“We consider the donation to the healthy heart operation programme as our corporate responsibility and a business guideline in joining hands with the society to help needy people, especially children in Viet Nam,” Lixil Vietnam’s general director Masahiko Hiramoto said at the event.

The donation has brought the company’s total contribution to the fund to VND7.2 billion ($315,000), bringing the total children to have been helped by Lixil Vietnam in the past seven years to 200.

“Next year, the programme will celebrate its 10th anniversary. To date, the fund has raised around VND91 billion ($4 million) and provided heart surgeries nationwide to more than 3,500 poor children with congenital heart disease. The programme has also supported many hospitals in strengthening their professional ability and medical facilities,” said Viet Nam Television’s deputy chief office and the Vietnamese Heart Fund deputy director Do Tien Hung.

Like Lixil Vietnam, with more support from the business community, the programme can help many more needy children in Viet Nam, Hung added.

Initiated by the Vietnamese Heart Fund, Viet Nam Television and Viettel Group in 2008, the programme aims to provide free heart surgeries to needy children and strengthen the capacity of the paediatric heart sector in the country.

As per health ministry statistics, 8,000 to 10,000 infants are born with congenital heart defects every year in Viet Nam, and around 20,000 children in the country are still waiting for surgery. — VNS